Interest Form Process

Owned by Caleb Lim
Last updated: Aug 27, 2024 by Tyler Hill
2 min read

Overview

This document serves to explain the interest form process for Nebula Labs.

Motivation

Our matching process exists to put new recruits in the best environment to thrive and help build strong teams for project leads.

In an ideal world, we would like to match everyone who is interested to a project team. However, our project leads can only support so many people on the team (they are students after all ). Thus, each project team has a maximum number of people who can be on the team to ensure that each team member has an opportunity to contribute and receive support from the team.

We realized that a laissez-faire approach to recruitment led to uneven and volatile team sizes that also left many recruits feeling neglected, uninformed, and left behind. We believe that this approach helps project leads find all the team members needed to build out their projects and provide recruits with a much better experience within the org.

Process

At the beginning of the semester, we will formally match people onto teams through an interest form. Anyone interested in joining a project will fill out the interest form. This is done to help teams be better prepared for the influx of new people joining their projects.

From there, we will match people onto projects based on their availability, interest, and skills. Being matched onto a team entails being added to internal tools, a commitment from Nebula Labs to provide support, and a commitment from individuals to contribute consistent work.

We will match people onto 1 project for 1 role to start with. Working on multiple projects / having multiple roles will be considered as a case-by-case basis with the respective project lead.

Anyone who isn’t matched onto a team is still free to attend project/division meetings to learn, interact with the team, and contribute on any open issues. From there, anyone who displays significant interest and makes a contribution to a project may be invited to formally join the team on a case-by-case basis.

For individuals who want to “join” a team after the interest form process is over, they will talk to the project lead on a case-by-case basis. Project leads will decide based on team capacity, interest, and skills.

FAQs

What does being “matched” to a team entail?

  1. Added to our software tools

    1. JIRA/Confluence for all

    2. GitHub for engineers

    3. Figma for designers

  2. Given issues to work on each week

  3. Receive support on issues from Nebula Labs

I was not “matched” to a team. How can I still be involved?

  1. Attend project/division meetings (all meetings are open to the public)

  2. Work on any open issues not given to team members

  3. Come to our events (all hands, after hours, socials, etc)

Additionally, we will provide learning resources for your respective role to build your skills.